About

Bridget M. Haas holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, with training in medical and psychological anthropology. Her research examines immigration policies and institutions as key determinants of health and mental health. She is particularly interested in how U.S. immigration policies produce suffering and distress for migrants in ways that are often routinized and rendered invisible.

Her book Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the US Asylum System, was published in 2023 by the University of California Press. This book draws on longitudinal ethnographic research among Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers in the midwestern United States, to explore the social, emotional, and embodied effects of being embedded in the complex, criminalizing, and protracted US asylum system. She is also the co-editor, with Amy Shuman, of Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum (Ohio University Press, 2019). Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed outlets such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Ethos, Social Science and Medicine, Child Abuse and Neglect, among others.

Dr. Haas’s current research focuses on the lived and everyday effects of immigration enforcement on immigrant families and communities in Ohio, tracing how detention and deportation regimes shape experiences of time and uncertainty while reconfiguring family and social relationships and forms of political subjectivity. She is also engaged in collaborative ethnographic research in immigration court, analyzing how legal processes, bureaucratic practices, and discretionary decision-making produce uneven forms of vulnerability and constraint, while shaping migrants’ strategies of navigation, endurance, and claim-making.

Her recent work also includes research on mental health interventions for refugee and asylum-seeking survivors of torture, as well as studies of newly arrived refugees’ experiences of domestic medical examinations in the United States.

In addition to her primary research on immigration and health/mental health, Dr. Haas maintains a research agenda on child and family well-being and has contributed to interdisciplinary research on child maltreatment.

At CWRU, Dr. Haas teaches introductory courses in medical and psychological anthropology, as well as courses on migration and health, the anthropology of childhood and the family, and global mental health.

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